Develop Office Client Applications using Visual Studio
Today we released the Microsoft Office 2010 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) Bootstrapper Installer which adds the Microsoft Office 2010 Primary Interop Assemblies to the Prerequisites Dialog Box in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Then when you deploy with ClickOnce or Windows Installer, you can select this option to deploy the Microsoft Office 2010… Read more
Managed Office add-ins traditionally have been able to run in the targeted application (the version of the application whose PIAs the add-in references) and in later versions of the application. Therefore, if you need to create a single VSTO add-in that can be run in multiple versions of an application, the typical guidance is to develop the add-in by using a project template… Read more
I was chatting with some of my friends about Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 and they asked me why should they move their application to .Net Framework 4, I am answering the question here for everybody to benefit. Frankly speaking there is no definitive answer; it is like there is no single pill… Read more
One frequent customer question is about how to deploy an application and all of its prerequisites in a single .msi or .exe file. This question applies whether you are deploying any of the following: Microsoft Office 2003 solutions with dependencies on .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 SE runtime, Microsoft Office 2007… Read more
The Visual Studio team is designing the runtime components for Office 2010 so that your Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 .NET addins, document solutions and spreadsheet solutions will run on 64-bit Office 2010. These runtime components will ship with Office 2010, so your end-users won’t even have to download a… Read more
A customer recently reported this bug when running their Shared Addin for Excel on French Windows. Error: 0x80028018 (-2147647512) Description: Old Format or Invalid Type Library His solution worked great on English Windows, but gave errors in any other language. This is a known problem in Excel and there are a few workarounds that work… Read more
After you develop Office solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office, you can use Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to simplify your deployment experience. First, you can take advantage of the smaller .NET Framework Client Profile to decrease download time. Next, the Office 2007 primary interop assemblies (PIAs) are included in-the-box with VS2008 SP1 to avoid… Read more
The Visual Basic team posted a walkthrough today on some of the new language features in Visual Basic and C# to help with Office programmability in Visual Studio 2010. Specific features include adding optional parameters to C# 4.0 (VB already has this) and removing the dependency on the Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). You can download… Read more
Deploying or installing the Office primary interop assemblies (PIAs) can sometimes be problematic. There are several common errors that occur when you try to deploy or install the PIAs. Deployment pitfalls A. Can I deploy the PIA DLL with my setup project? Yes, you can include the PIA DLL in your setup project, but we… Read more
When you use ClickOnce in Visual Studio 2008 to deploy your Office solution, you can include prerequisites such as the .NET Framework 3.5, the Visual Studio Tools for Office system 3.0 Runtime, and Windows Installer 3.1. However, the primary interop assemblies (PIAs) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system are not automatically listed in the Prerequisites… Read more